Dispatches from California Institute of Integral Studies.

East West Psychology

January 10, 2013

By MONICA MODY, author of "Travel & Risk" and two other chapbooks. Her first book, "Kala Pani," is forthcoming from 1913 Press. She is currently a PhD.candidate in East-West Psychology at CIIS

Here at the East-West Psychology program we are trying to find new ways to reconnect or bring into conversation dualities such as the self and the world, body and earth, psyche and spirit, art and scholarship, being and activism. We are interested in how myth and symbol and dreams work, and in their relationship to the healing of the planet, of the self.

The myths that live in our unconscious contain us and contain our world. This is why a project to re-enchant the self and the world requires re-enchanted myths: alive, vital, continually opening, in relationship.

As a poet, my task is to add to the repertoire of myths that can participate in this re-enchanting, healing, re-awakening. Through the last year, I wrote a sequence of myths attempting to do that. One of them is below. You can read some other myths from the sequence at Lantern Review and Pyrta.

"Don't be satisfied with the stories that come before you; unfold your own myth."

December 11, 2012

By CRAIG CHALQUIST, who will be taking over as department chair of East-West Psychology in January 2013. Craig teaches mythology, depth psychology, and ecopsychology at CIIS.

When we talk about how to power our civilization we seldom look at the mythic images involved. Yet C.G. Jung, Karl Kerényi, Hermann Hesse, Thomas Mann, Edith Hamilton, and Joseph Campbell all insisted that myths are not just archaic theories for what science has now explained.

Rather, myths make visible the underside of a culture just as dreams make visible the life going on in the personal unconscious. That is why myths never die, they only get reinvented: the zombies of old not given up by the civilized mind, but shambling along looking like half-dead banks full of toxic assets; the Golem reinvented as the robot; Merlin’s wand molded into the smartphone; the figure of the giant now the world-girdling transnational corporation; the bursting cosmic egg of many mythologies referred to now as the Big Bang. As Campbell’s famous statement from The Hero with a Thousand Faces tells us, “The latest incarnation of Oedipus, the continued romance of Beauty and the Beast, stand this afternoon on the corner of 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue, waiting for the traffic light to change.”

What mythic images confront us in the debate about clean versus dirty energy?

It took our planet billions of years to remove enough carbon from the atmosphere to allow life to take hold and grow here. By contrast, the extractive energy industries--especially coal and petroleum--reverse that great cycle of evolution. Little wonder that mythic images of the Underworld, including the Christian Hell, always follow extractive operations. Entire decapitated mountain ranges in Appalachia now resemble something out of Dante’s Inferno. The Cuyahoga River has burned thirteen times because of oil spills: our version of Phlegethon, the flaming river in ancient Greek mythology.

Oil and coal are dark, poisonous, and dangerous to mine and to manipulate. It’s breathtaking to imagine internal combustion imagistically: an entire civilization powered by inner explosions whose smothering byproducts make the atmosphere dim and feverish. Pluto may have been downgraded as a planet, but he is alive and powerful here on Earth: Pluto, deadly god of hidden wealth and root of the word “plutocracy.”

By contrast, images of abundance follow solar, wind, and water power. Enough sunlight falls on Earth in an hour to power everything for a year. Generous sunlight, unceasing wind, rippling waves bring organic images of bounty and flow, cycle and season. The installations that catch their energies without fracking up the biosphere do not explode like oil refineries do. Troops are not dispatched to foreign lands to fight for sunlight, wind, or wave, nor are financial empires built on the hydraulic despotism of monopolizing these free resources.

The gods of extraction are dark, hidden, or fiery deities, but those of alternative energy move freely across the sea and sky without regard for archaic national borders or destructive political alignments.

The question of which energy sources to rely on, then, is also a question of which mythic images we favor: the dangerous and lethal, or the abundant and natural? The confined and hidden or the bright and free? At the gas pump we pay homage to Pluto and Mars, but how might we shift our allegiance to Helios and Gaia?

CIIS was mentioned as already teaching from a "similar perspective" (the reference to the Institute of Transpersonal Studies was actually an error—the reference should have been to ITP, now known as Sofia University); but CIIS has pioneered in the integration of psychology and spirituality for over 40 years; no university has been doing it longer or more comprehensively.

I appreciated the distinction made by Julie Exline, president of the APA's Society for the Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, who pointed out that Columbia's (and CIIS') approach to psychology and spirituality is very different from that offered by faith-based schools, and it is rare in academia.

The most wide-ranging approach to the integration of psychology and spirituality at CIIS is actually in the School of Consciousness and Transformation, particularly in East-West Psychology, because there are limits to how much spirituality can be formally incorporated into the curriculum of license-eligible clinical degrees. In our clinical programs the spiritual component is typically, and notably, embodied in the teachers (and students). Still, I believe it is possible to make spirituality even more explicit in our clinical training programs (as we are doing in the Mindfulness and Compassion in Psychotherapy certificate offered through CIIS Public Programs & Performances).

June 15, 2012

We are often asked how we came to the idea of writing Integral Dreaming. The book is our collaborative attempt to reveal the complexity and multidimensionality of dreams. Having been part of the dream studies movement since the early 1980s, we realized early on that dreams are a phenomenon too complex to be narrowed down to one discipline or a single author’s theoretical stance. We set ourselves the task of integrating the rigor of science with the wholeness of the multidimensional being.

The concept of Integral Dreaming evolved out of twenty-five years of dialogue, co-teaching and research. We met at the inaugural conference of the International Association for the Study of Dreams (IASD) in 1984 in San Francisco. At the time, we both were graduate students living in Canada, Fariba studying psychology, researching consciousness and dreams at the University of Regina, and Daniel a doctoral student at Université de Montreal, working on a project marrying cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence and dreams. We were both also practicing artists: Fariba trained in the visual and multimedia arts and Daniel in music and dance. Every year we met at the IASD conference and attended each other’s presentations. It became apparent early on that each of us, in our unique ways, understood the value of dreaming not only from the perspective of the “hard sciences”, but also from depth psychology and creativity. Before naming it, our approach was already integral.

The intellectual and artistic common ground we shared brought us together as colleagues. At IASD conferences, we participated in dream theater presentations that merged science, archetypal exploration and cross-cultural music and dance (Santa Cruz, 1988 and London, 1989).

At the 1985 IASD conference, Fariba met psycho-physiologist and lucid dream researcher Stephen LaBerge who introduced her to CIIS. Fariba joined his lucid dream team at Stanford Sleep Laboratory. Transferring her courses from the University of Regina to CIIS, she received her MA and PhD in East-West Psychology. Her research explored transpersonal experiences in lucid dreaming. Trained in somatic psychology, art and shamanic studies, she developed Dream Creations as a set of integrative and creative methods to explore dreams. She was appointed as faculty member at JFK University where she founded the Dream Studies program in 1996. Simultaneously, she continued her career as an artist, exploring the connection between arts and consciousness.

EWP doctoral candidate Zayin Cabot will present, “Evolution and the Poetics of Indigenous Participation: African and American Indian Modes of Participation"; and EWP doctoral student Samuel Malkemus will present, “The Clash of Instinct and Culture: Eros, Phobos and the Roots of Morality.”

The current exhibition of visual work and poetry displayed at the all-new CIIS Student Gallery is inspired by the question, “What is uniquely human?” The exhibition presents work by both students and alumni of CIIS, who inquire into the thematic question using a range of artistic practices.

The theme for the exhibition holds particular relevance for the CIIS community, engaged as it is in transformative practices that redefine what it is to be human and what it is to be in community—as humans—with other humans and non-humans.

“The CIIS community is grounded in the transformation of consciousness, healing, and deep emotional engagement: the show offers a mirror through which the university can see its preoccupations reflected back at itself,” says Jenelle Campion, who co-curated the exhibition with Daunielle Rasmussen. Campion and Rasmussen are both in their second year of MFA programs at the Department of Writing, Consciousness, and Creative Inquiry.

The show features works in mixed media, acrylic, and oil; pencil portraits; photographs; and poems. Together, these artworks are acute explorations of suffering and compassion, the emotion of happiness, religious and spiritual conflicts, what it means to be transgressive, the witnessing self, alter-selves, and relationships—including to plant forms and animal forms.

“The entries radiate with the heart the artists put in their work,” says Campion, adding that the curators were gratified by the student-body’s response to the call for submissions and the conviction in art-making it demonstrates. By inviting art that was not made only inside the MFA enclosure, their curatorial process turned the show into an investigation into why we make art and a call to widen our conception of art communities. “We wanted to challenge the image of the artist sitting in the dark hovel of art-making,” stresses Campion.

We’ve talked for many years in our integral education meetings about how we as faculty can deepen learning and engage the multiple ways of knowing that are often left out of the typical “chalk and talk” classroom experience. In this regard I have rediscovered a classic technique, surely familiar to everyone from their elementary school days--show and tell.

My first implementation of show and tell was in a weekend intensive workshop, co-conducted with Shoshana Simons of the Expressive Arts Therapy program, on the theme of language and sexuality (a burgeoning and lively realm of inquiry currently). On Friday evening, after orienting the students to the purposes of the course and starting them on their individual inquiries, we asked them to look around their homes and personal spaces for objects that touched on some aspect of their sexual and romantic lives. Their assignment was to reflect on their own sexual identity socialization in light of the class material, and to bring these objects to class on Saturday, prepared to share with their classmates. We told them we would assemble their objects in an altar.

That same night, I started the altar by sharing three artifacts of my own. I began with a small lavender plastic figurine of Tinky Winky, the infamous Teletubbie with the triangle antenna on his head who was “outed” as gay by Christian Fundamentalists. Tinky Winky was a gift from a friend and immediately gained a place of honor on my personal altar at home.

I told the class that, for me, he represented the power of queerness to bring the dominant into an obviously irrational frenzy simply by the tiniest hint of refusing to conform to heteronomativity. I loved the irony that a television program for 2-year-olds was now being seriously presented as a means of recruiting homosexuals. This tiny little figure ignited a firestorm among Evangelicals, and yet, Tinky Winky continued to show up on the TV each week to “work” in his bucolic green meadow under a smiling sun unscathed by the controversy swirling around him.

I explained that Tinky was a model for me as a gay man in his perseverance and power, and even if he were only questioning--understandable given his missing genitalia--I would count him as a queer little brother and fellow sacred clown.

You might imagine what I shared about a picture of my mother and father as two beautiful young people in love (my mother a virgin), embracing just after taking their vows (and years before their subsequent divorce when I was only two). A picture of me and a former Brazilian lover dressed as Carmen Miranda was fodder for reflection on gender as performance. I enjoyed showing up as a teacher and as a whole person with a history, and felt that this in and of itself was a kind of intervention in the business-as-usual of college teaching.

On Saturday morning we began with 12 students and two instructors in a small windowless room with the chairs arranged in a circle. One young woman brought a condom and shared what it had cost her to be prepared for safe sex. Many men she dated had been doubly surprised when she had whipped out a Trojan Magnum condom at the critical moment—first that she was apparently ready for sex, and second owing to the extra-large size of the prophylactic in question. This was enough to end the encounter in some instances. She spoke of the contradictions inherent in being socialized as a sexually active woman who was not supposed to want sex.

A young gay man brought a gold wedding band and explained how he had at one point intended to give it to his partner as part of a commitment ceremony. Then, gay weddings were legal in California for a while and there was the possibility of the band becoming a real wedding ring. Before the couple could consecrate the marriage, the law changed; he then broke up with his partner.

The man asked us to look at the ring: “It’s a wedding ring, it’s not a wedding ring, it’s a wedding ring. This is the story of my life as a gay man.”

A woman in her 30s who had only recently committed to a relationship with a woman brought photos showing various aspects of her butch and femme personas. She shared her struggle as someone who was learning how to talk and behave like a “good lesbian.”

Each story and object shared had a tremendous impact on the group, and the effect of the ensemble was truly remarkable. We arranged the objects in a corner of the room and left them there for the duration of the workshop. We would dip into them from time to time for a new story, providing a thread of coherence throughout our time together. I found that the possibility of going deep was fully present for us as a group after the initial round of sharing. There were many additional benefits: people introduced themselves and bonded without the usual delay; there were many ready examples to draw from as we explicated the theoretical approaches in the class; the material presence of the objects reminded us of what we had been talking about and energetically charged the room with their storied presence.

I had a similar experience conducting the show and tell exercise with colleagues in CIIS’ Teaching and Learning Group. I asked them to bring objects that represented their personal relationship with teaching. We each presented our object, then observed the assembled altar, wrote about what we saw and heard, and debriefed as to what we had learned about teaching and learning.

We witnessed: a family picture book with pages ripped out, a farmer doll, a pair of eyeglasses, a stone with the word “nothing” engraved in it--nothing is written in stone. My colleagues reported that it was particularly helpful to have been looking for the objects in the two weeks prior to the meeting. It caused them to think deeply about their work and sort through what was really important to them as teachers and learners. They remarked afterwards on the moving quality of the stories and the glimpses into each other’s intimate worlds that would not otherwise have been afforded.

This activity could be adapted to a wide variety of audiences and purposes as a way of getting beyond superficial classroom routines. It has the potential to establish a more intimate rapport among members of any learning community and a more personal and critical engagement with virtually any academic content. To be fair, this is nothing other than show and tell in the 17th grade.

Some of the best teaching still seems to come from the elementary level, in my experience. Our colleagues in kindergarten can remind those of us in higher education how to enroll the storied things of daily life as our co-teachers.